PART ONE
Vertical and Horizontal Connections
Choose 3 out of the following 4 (passages, photos or texts pairings).
Always begin at the
descriptive level: what’s the passage/artifact doing, how does it work
(formally); what big idea(s) is the artist interested in; what evidence in the
text points to those ideas? Move horizontally
by putting it under a conceptual umbrella with other work(s)… How do you put
this in conversation with other works? How do other works revise/challenge/extend
elements of this text?
1) The door was open. Gitl stood toying with the knob of the electric bell, and deriving much delight from the way the street door latch kept clicking under her magic touch two flights above. Finally she wearied of her diversion, and shutting the door she went to take a look at Yosselé. She found him fast asleep, and, as she was retracing her steps through her own and Jake's bedroom, her eye fell upon the paper boxes. She got up on the edge of her bed and, lifting the cover from the hatbox, she took a prolonged look at its contents. All at once her face brightened up with temptation. She went to fasten the hallway door of the kitchen on its latch, and then regaining the bedroom shut herself in. After a lapse of some ten or fifteen minutes she re-emerged, attired in her brown holiday dress in which she had first confronted Jake on Ellis Island, and with the tall black straw hat on her head. Walking on tiptoe, as though about to commit a crime, she crossed over to the looking-glass. Then she paused, her eyes on the door, to listen for possible footsteps. Hearing none she faced the glass. "Quite a panenke!" (noble woman )she thought to herself, all aglow with excitement, a smile, at once shamefaced and beatific, melting her features. She turned to the right, then to the left, to view herself in profile, as she had seen Mrs. Kavarsky do, and drew back a step to ascertain the effect of the corset.
2)
When he remembered his childhood, he remembered blue water. There were certain human figures against it, of course; his practical, strong-willed Methodist mother, his gentle, weaned-away Catholic father, the old Kanuck grandfather, various brothers and sisters. But the great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. It was the first thing one saw in the morning, across the rugged cow pasture studded with shaggy pines, and it ran through the days like the weather, not a thing thought about, but a part of consciousness itself. When the ice chunks came in of a winter morning, crumbly and white, throwing off gold and rose-coloured reflections from a copper-coloured sun behind the grey clouds, he didn't observe the detail or know what it was that made him happy; but now, forty years later, he could recall all its aspects perfectly. They had made pictures in him when he was unwilling and unconscious, when his eyes were merely open wide.
3) TEXT PAIRING
LULA
Yea
for him. Yea, yea for him.
CLAY
Yea!
LULA
And
yea for America where he is free to vote for the mediocrity of his choice!
Yea!
CLAY
Yea!
LULA
And
yea for both your parents who even though they differ about so crucial a matter
as the body politic
still
forged a union of love and sacrifice that was destined to flower at the birth
of the noble Clay
...
what's
your middle name?
CLAY
Clay.
LULA
A
union of love and sacrifice that was destined to flower at the birth of the
noble Clay Clay Williams.
Yea!
And most of all yea yea for you, Clay, Clay. The Black Baudelaire! Yes!
[And
with knifelike cynicism] My Christ. My Christ.
***************************
Stenographer: Why don't you get to work?
Young Woman: What?
Adding Clerk: Work!
Young Woman: Can't.
Steneographer: Can't?
Young Woman: My Machine's out of order.
Stenographer: Well, fix it!
4)
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